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During the twentieth century, the United States declared war on wildfires. In 1935, the chief of the U.S. Forest Service announced “an experiment on a continental scale”: every blaze was to be put out by 10 A.M. on the morning after it began. Given that fires had been burning regularly for hundreds of millions of years, this was an enormous departure from the natural order. Fire clears vegetation and delivers nutrients to soil, creating fresh cycles of growth that help ecosystems. Without it, American forests became dense, prone to megafires, and vulnerable to drought; woods encroached on prairies and wetlands. Only after decades of suppression did the government act on the wisdom of scientists, Indigenous communities, and fire practitioners who understood the benefits of fire. Starting in the sixties, a different kind of experiment began: federal agencies started setting fires intentionally and, in rare cases, allowing naturally occurring wildfires to restore landscapes.

And so, on July 4th, when lightning started a small fire along the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park, firefighters did not rush to put it out. If anything, the location of the blaze seemed ideal. Park managers had already been planning to burn ten thousand of the surrounding acres in the fall of 2027, and they knew that the fire, which was dubbed Dragon Bravo by a dispatcher, would have a difficult time spreading. To the south and west, the rim of the canyon provided a natural barrier. To the north and east, along a dirt road called the W1, workers had already cleared a buffer. Park officials approved the decision to “contain” the fire rather than extinguish it. It was now considered a managed wildfire.

To predict where Dragon Bravo might spread, park employees used a modelling tool that created probability maps from thousands of potential weather scenarios. The forecast was sunny, with light winds from the east; the fire was predicted to grow to seven hundred and fifty acres in its first week, with a low risk of hazardous behavior. The actual fire burned only fifty-eight acres by day five. Firefighters expected it to go the way of the fire’s namesake, an earlier fire named Dragon, which seasonal monsoons helped extinguish in 2022. We’ll be lucky if it hits the W1, an experienced firefighter remembered thinking.

Resources were diverted to another wildfire, in the nearby Kaibab National Forest. But then, on the afternoon of July 11th, the weather began to defy forecasts. The temperature reached ninety degrees. The relative humidity—an important indicator of the dryness of vegetation—plummeted. The wind switched direction; flames rose to the crowns of conifer trees and spewed embers. Within hours, Dragon Bravo had doubled in size. By evening, it had jumped the W1 and was encroaching on firefighters. It had morphed into what’s called a fast fire, one that grows four thousand acres or more in a single day. The 2018 Camp Fire, the 2023 Maui fire, and the 2025 Los Angeles fires were all fast fires.

The firefighters retreated about five miles southeast, where a fire station, staff housing, and the Grand Canyon Lodge on the North Rim were situated. Models had recently given the fire a 0.2-to-four-per-cent chance of reaching the lodge, but now crews began preparing to defend the structures. Fire and smoke overtook them. Propane tanks exploded. Some took cover from the heat behind vehicles; others found refuge at a nearby heliport. Chlorine gas began leaking from a sewage-treatment plant. The experienced firefighter saw the fire below the rim, moving sideways, and then shooting up the slope like a geyser. “It was almost like watching a volcano.”

An evacuation order spread across the entire North Rim. Robin Bies, a staff member at the Kaibab Lodge, some fifteen miles to the north, drove two hikers and their grandchildren to the South Rim, four hours away. At about 2 A.M., she looked back across the canyon and saw the red glow of Dragon Bravo. “It was just surreal,” she told me. The blaze ultimately covered a hundred and forty-five thousand acres in the span of three months, making it the largest American wildfire in 2025. Bies often wondered why firefighters hadn’t simply put it out to begin with.

A few weeks after Dragon Bravo was fully extinguished, I went to the North Rim in hope of understanding its impact. Driving through the Kaibab National Forest and Grand Canyon National Park, I crisscrossed the fire’s footprint for more than fifty miles. Some roads had only recently reopened. The last few miles of Arizona State Route 67, which led to the Grand Canyon Lodge, were still blockaded; the lodge had burned to a husk, and dozens of other homes and buildings were gone, too.

Once Dragon Bravo broke containment lines, firefighters tried every available tool to stop its progression: aircraft, fire engines, bulldozers, handcrews, hotshots, drones. These battles were written into the landscape. I could see that, in some places, firefighters had halted Dragon Bravo’s advance at a road. Herds of bison were grazing on grass that had sprouted in the blackened soil. In other spots, I saw that the fire had jumped a road and raced up a steep slope. Some evergreen trees were so crispy that they looked like matchsticks.

I stayed the night at the Kaibab Lodge, which had served as a federal-incident command post after the North Rim was evacuated. Bies helped provide food and accommodations for hundreds of wildland firefighters. “They became like family,” she told me. She made weekly trips into town to fetch them cigarettes. A sign was still hanging over the reception desk: “Welcome Dragon Slayers.”

I stood with one of Bies’s colleagues, Mark Harvey, the lodge’s handyman, in front of a grand stone fireplace. Snow was falling outside; now and then, he fed the fire a cured aspen log. How had their lodge survived? “Just luck,” Harvey said. “The wind changed direction.” He showed me videos of orange flames pulsing against the night sky. Not until mid-August did rain help firefighters corral Dragon Bravo, and the fire wasn’t fully contained until late September. Still, Harvey didn’t see the fire as a calamity. “It’s just a cycle of the forest,” he said. “We’ve got to burn all the old stuff out.” He was looking forward to spring, when he predicted that piney grouse would return and morel mushrooms would proliferate.

Many of my sources feared that Dragon Bravo would invite scrutiny of the very idea of managed wildfires. Arizona’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, called for an official investigation, arguing that “Arizonans deserve answers for how this fire was allowed to decimate the Grand Canyon National Park.” Other politicians have been voicing skepticism that any wildfires should be allowed to burn. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation policy agenda that has heavily influenced the Trump Administration, criticized the Forest Service for using “unplanned fire” for vegetation management, advocating instead for timber extraction. The Republican governor of Montana, Greg Gianforte, has demanded that the Forest Service “fully embrace an aggressive initial and extended attack strategy.” This year, Trump’s appointee to the chief of the Forest Service said in an annual letter that it was “critical that we suppress fires as swiftly as possible.”

The backlash is coming at a pivotal moment. Historically, thousands of firefighters have worked for diverse agencies within the Department of the Interior: the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service. These entities’ goals are more nuanced than fire suppression; they also value conservation and wilderness protection. But, as early as January, 2026, the Trump Administration plans to consolidate these firefighters under a new agency, the Wildland Fire Service, which will “reflect the increasing risk to people, property and infrastructure,” according to a September press release. (The Forest Service is part of the Department of Agriculture, so its eleven thousand firefighters will remain separate for now.) The Department of the Interior declined to elaborate on the new agency’s priorities.

Researchers, land managers, and firefighters warned that the federal government may be on the verge of regressing into a twentieth-century attitude about fire policy. “Once you create an agency that’s only focussed on fire, life and safety become the main focus, and any notion of fire as a multipurpose ecological tool loses its value,” a research scientist who worked with the Forest Service for decades told me. The Wildland Fire Service will have an incentive to avoid short-term risk rather than manage a wildfire for the sake of the ecosystem, she said. (Since Greece moved its wildland fire response from its forest service to its national fire agency, in the late nineties, its wildfire crisis has deepened; the country now spends four hundred million dollars on putting out fires, compared with only twenty-five million on land management and wildfire prevention, according to research from 2021.) “My biggest fear is that the people in charge of this consolidation are not the people who understand ecologically beneficial fire,” a senior firefighter told me. “It’s hero shit. ‘Get out there and put it out.’ ”

Managed wildfires have spread out of control before. In 1988, when such blazes were called “prescribed natural fires,” they contributed to the Yellowstone fires, which burned around 1.2 million acres over the course of five months. Sensationalized media accounts claimed that pristine forests and animal populations were decimated, which helped fuel a public backlash against the Park Service’s approach to managed wildfires. Yet ecologists now know that even those fires, though large and severe, were completely natural. “Everyone thought Yellowstone was destroyed,” Monica Turner, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin, told me. “It came back just wonderfully well on its own, without our intervention.”

Fire scientists believe that a patchwork of fire intensity—low in some places, high in others—increases the dynamism and resilience of a landscape. Repeated wildfires can create a mosaic of interlocking burned and unburned areas, which can curb subsequent blazes for a period afterward: flames can only go so far before they reach a place that has already recently ignited. In the past half century, dozens of managed wildfires have moved through a sixty-square-mile area in the Illilouette Creek Basin, in Yosemite National Park. The result of so much fire may seem counterintuitive. Scientists have discovered wet meadows proliferating and mature trees flourishing. Data suggests that, compared with the rest of the national park, the basin could be better prepared for future blazes and droughts that are a projected consequence of climate change.

Could Dragon Bravo similarly bolster the ecosystem of the North Rim? Fortuitously, the fire burned through preëxisting study plots maintained by the park’s ecologists. In August, an interdisciplinary team of experts including engineers, biologists, and vegetation specialists collected soil samples and looked at satellite imagery. They found that only two per cent of the soil had burned at a high severity, meaning that soil properties were largely not altered or damaged. Researchers will continue to gather data on soil, vegetation, and hydrology for years to come.

I heard differing opinions about the fire’s wider impact on vegetation. Historically, the North Rim burned in large, periodic fires; during the eighteenth century, it experienced four major regional wildfires. The last large-scale fire was in 1879, and fuel loads—measured in tons per acre—eventually climbed to dangerous levels. By some estimates, the tree density of the North Rim before Dragon Bravo was more than three hundred per cent higher than it was a century ago. “We certainly achieved those goals of reducing tons per acre,” the experienced firefighter said. “Over all, I think we had good effects in most of the areas.” But a local firefighter based in Flagstaff, who had seen maps of burn severity, said that some areas may be permanently transformed—for example, from forest to shrubland.

During my drive, the North Rim looked operatic. In a single hour, I drove under blue skies and through hailstorms. Thunder rumbled overhead. Rainbows framed my view of the Colorado River. When I stopped to walk through burned areas, along the eastern flank of Dragon Bravo, I saw mule deer run through colonies of aspen trees. Beneath majestic ponderosa pines, I dug into the blackened topsoil to find brown, untouched earth. At one point, I parked next to a patch of blackened Gambel oaks. On a rock, I saw a plaque that quoted Theodore Roosevelt: “Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it.”

Only half a per cent of unplanned ignitions are allowed to burn as managed wildfires. Many scientists worry that, at a time when they should be getting more widespread, they will only become rarer. Jennifer Balch, a geographer at the University of Colorado Boulder, has studied the dangers of fast fires and found that they’re uniquely damaging and costly to fight. Still, she argued that we need to keep finding opportunities for managed wildfires. Dragon Bravo hasn’t changed her mind.

In Balch’s view, the upsides of wildfires remain underappreciated. Her preliminary research, which is currently undergoing peer review, shows that, between 2010 and 2020, 3.1 million hectares of forest burned in what she deemed good wildfires. (Her definition: fires that have ecological benefits and match historical patterns of fires in the area.) That’s even larger than the 1.4 million hectares that were burned intentionally, in prescribed fires.

Firefighters were still struggling to understand why Dragon Bravo exploded in intensity. “We prepped that road so many times,” the experienced firefighter said of the W1. “I thought it was as secure as it could be.” Some of my sources felt that modelling tools are failing to account for new extremes. Faulty models also seemed to play a role in the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire—the most destructive wildfire in the history of New Mexico.

The Department of the Interior has begun an official investigation. Early coverage of Dragon Bravo consistently described it as a managed wildfire that was being contained, not suppressed; Watch Duty, a nonprofit that tracks wildfires in real time, reported on July 8th that Dragon Bravo was being managed “for resource benefit objectives using a confine/contain strategy,” citing the public-affairs office of Grand Canyon National Park. But, when I contacted the same office, a spokesperson offered a different narrative, asserting that, “from the beginning, the fire was managed under a suppression strategy.” One of my sources, a wildfire expert who has written fire-management plans for the National Park Service, considered this claim “incoherent” and worried that it would be seen as an “inept coverup.” My sources who fought the fire felt that the park had not been forthcoming with information, and that, as a result, they had been vilified by the media and the public for struggling to contain Dragon Bravo. But I was surprised to learn that the experience did not lead to a crisis of faith in managed wildfires. If anything, it seemed to have strengthened firefighters’ convictions. “In my mind, I’m more aggressive,” the experienced firefighter said. “We got to burn more.” The Park’s public-affairs office did not respond to follow-up questions.

On my way back from the North Rim, as the sun was setting, I stopped in Coconino National Forest to meet the Flagstaff firefighter. In this part of the state, close to seven hundred thousand acres have burned in managed wildfires since 2010. These blazes are credited with helping undo the damage of fire suppression and returning the world’s largest continuous ponderosa-pine forest to health. The sky was turning pink; from where we stood, on the edge of a meadow, the North Rim was just a band of dark blue on the horizon. The firefighter told me that he’d been there when the Grand Canyon Lodge, a place that he loved, burned. “It was easily the most complex situation I’ve ever experienced firsthand,” he said. “Fighting fire in a nighttime environment mixed with power lines, no water, and homes burning. That is an impossible battle you can’t win.” During a crew debriefing afterward, he told me, he and many others had cried in frustration.

The firefighter pointed to a cluster of trees that had been struck by lightning in June. The surrounding area, like the North Rim, had been scheduled for several prescribed burns. He’d heard that federal officials, in Washington, had voiced a preference that the fire be suppressed quickly. Instead, a number of hotshot crews herded and cajoled and steered the fire, helping it to burn ten thousand acres in three days. Managing the fire cost around seventy dollars per acre, the firefighter estimated; a prescribed burn might have cost a thousand an acre. “We know what good land management looks like,” he told me. “We felt the pressure not to do it, and we did it anyway.” Then he paused, took in the scene before us, and added, “I just love this fire.” ♦

“Train Dreams” is a beautiful movie, but I can’t say that I entirely trust its beauty. The director, Clint Bentley, and the cinematographer, Adolpho Veloso, have composed a studiedly rapturous hymn to the American wilderness—to the scenic glories of babbling brooks, wispy cloud formations, and trees soaring majestically heavenward. It’s an exaltation of the natural world, rendered with an almost supernatural intensity of light and color, and with a score, by Bryce Dessner, whose rippling chords seem to evoke the sounds of cascading water. Watching the movie earlier this year, via the Sundance Film Festival’s online-viewing platform, I marvelled at the clarity of Veloso’s images, with their sharp interplay of sunshine and shadows: a patch of emerald-green forest, glimpsed from inside a cavernous tunnel, didn’t lose its contrasts on my home TV. A second viewing, this time in a proper theatre, proved more captivating still: here, at last, was a screen capacious enough to withstand the radiance of a golden-pink sunset and the faces of Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones. This is craftsmanship of an undeniably majestic order, and it has a way of both dropping your jaw and raising an eyebrow; you begin to wonder, at a certain point, if the film’s visual splendor has begun to outstrip its meaning. How exquisite is too exquisite?

If that seems an ungenerous response, it arises, I think, from the comparatively thorny, tough-minded spirit of the film’s source material: a 2011 novella of the same name, by Denis Johnson, who held the world’s beauty and its ugliness in more persuasive balance. The movie, like the novella, consists of moments from the life of Robert Grainier (Edgerton), a thoughtful, taciturn soul. He is orphaned as a young boy, sometime in the late nineteenth century, and spends much of his life in and around Bonners Ferry, Idaho; he dies, in 1968, in equally profound solitude. The eighty-odd years in between, though, are not untouched by love and companionship. Grainier falls for Gladys Olding (Jones), a churchgoing woman, as sparky and forthright as he is quiet and withdrawn. They marry, build a riverside cabin, and are soon raising an adorable baby daughter, Katie. But Grainier is a timberman, and his work forces him to leave his family for long stretches at a time. Sometimes he heads west, toward the Pacific; once, he ventures as far east as Montana. Where there are trees to be felled, lumber to be moved, and bridges and train tracks to be built, Grainier is there.

We learn much of this from an unseen narrator (voiced, superbly, by Will Patton), who maintains the same wry, semidetached tone whether he’s describing the odd comedy of Grainier’s life—or, in time, its defining tragedy. The narrator speaks bluntly but tenderly of Grainier’s irreducible ordinariness: he is one of countless men who, with no better prospects or singular passions to speak of, leave homes and families to undertake work of great danger, meagre pay, and, in the long run, monumental significance. The razing of forests and the construction of railroads—the unceasing industrialization of America, stretching across two world wars and touching the dawn of the space age—will reshape the very landscape of the country. But what mark will the individual laborers themselves leave? Not much, the film suggests. No wonder that when some of them die on the job, their boots are nailed into the trunks of trees, as a solemn act of remembrance: these men existed.

For Grainier, though, an unmourned death leaves an even deeper impression. One summer day in 1917, he tries to intervene—but ultimately can only watch, in helpless horror—when three white men rough up a Chinese railroad worker, Fu Sheng (Alfred Hsing) and hurl him off a trestle bridge, to his death. No reason for the killing is given, and the sheer inhuman senselessness of it won’t leave Grainier alone. For years afterward, he will be haunted by Fu’s reproachful ghost, silently castigating him for not doing more. On first viewing, something about the film’s treatment of Fu nagged at me, for reasons that I understood only after I read the novella, which takes a rather more complicated and, I think, more honest view of the circumstances. In Johnson’s original version, “the Chinaman,” as he’s called, stands accused of theft, and he ultimately escapes his captors. More pointedly, Johnson’s Grainier, far from being either an innocent bystander or a well-meaning protester, actively participates in the attempted execution. In the film, he defends Fu, asking, “What’s he done?” In the novella, he seizes the accused by the legs and cries out, “I’ve got the bastard, and I’m your man!”

Being something of an anti-originalist when it comes to adaptations, I wouldn’t suggest that Bentley and his co-screenwriter, Greg Kwedar, owe their source any strict fidelity. (The two men are frequent collaborators; they also wrote “Sing Sing,” which Kwedar directed, and “Jockey,” directed by Bentley.) Nonetheless, every change inevitably reveals something of the adapter’s intent, and what this particular departure betrays, I think, is a curious lack of faith in the audience—as if we could only sympathize with a morally unblemished protagonist, even one already imbued with Edgerton’s ineffable salt-of-the-earthiness and melancholy gravitas. As for Fu, he is little more than a pawn, a victim, and a spectral guilt trip; he dies and then returns, with no voice of his own, for the sake of Robert’s spiritual betterment. No one would expect this movie to encompass, or center, the history of indignities and sufferings endured by the Chinese laborers who helped build this country. But the filmmakers’ highly selective sampling of that history raises questions that “Train Dreams,” possessed of a kind of tunnel vision by design, has neither the ability nor the inclination to answer.

In a recent essay for Vulture, the critic Roxana Hadadi laid out a compelling argument in favor of Bentley and Kwedar’s liberties in adaptation, noting that they subtly transformed the film into a story “about the corrosive impact of passivity and inertia.” Passivity is certainly one of Grainier’s defining traits; resignation is another, and it is arguably what costs him a happy future with his family. When Gladys proposes that she and Katie accompany him on his work trips, he shoots down the suggestion, claiming that it’s too dangerous for them—an idea that will seem all the more bitterly ironic, in light of the dangers that, as we shall see, can surface at home.

For much of the film, though, Grainier is a quiet observer of other people’s tragedies. An early scene revisits a key memory from childhood, when more than a hundred Chinese families are deported from his town. Patton’s narrator tells us that “Grainier was baffled by the casualness of the violence.” Some time later, the young Grainier stumbles upon, and tentatively assists, an unnamed, gravely wounded man (Clifton Collins, Jr.) lying in the woods—an unpleasant incident, the narrator tells us, that he will push away from his mind in the years to come. In this instance, though, the film effectively uses Grainier’s psychology as cover for its own squeamishness. In the novella, the injured man confesses to raping and impregnating a twelve-year-old girl—a detail that has been airbrushed away here, in another morally sanitizing touch.

“Train Dreams” is thus something of a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of caution—and a movie that is ultimately tripped up by its own circumspection. But even its lapses and dodges have the effect of only strengthening my admiration for Edgerton, whose grizzled magnetism has seldom been more affecting. In scene after scene, Grainier plays the hushed foil to a more demonstrative scene partner, and in each instance he finds the drama in a stricken gaze, a wan smile, and, infrequently, a release of pent-up emotion. He forges perhaps his most meaningful friendship—and his most striking personality contrast—with Arn Peeples (William H. Macy), a dynamite expert who is, fittingly, an explosion of colorful chitchat. Peeples is one of the film’s designated folksy voices of conscience; around a campfire one night, he urges his fellow-lumbermen to consider the environmental implications of chopping down five-hundred-year-old trees en masse. “This world is intricately stitched together, boys,” he says. “Every thread we pull, we know not how it affects the design of things.”

Several years later, after leaving the logging business and settling down in his Idaho cabin for good, Grainier will cross paths with a U.S. Forest Service worker, Claire Thompson (a warm Kerry Condon), who is brought in to survey the region after a devastating wildfire. A fount of woodland wisdom, Thompson articulates her own version of Peeples’s sentiment: “In the forest, every least thing’s important,” she says. “It’s all threaded together, so you can’t tell where one thing ends and another begins.” These are stirring and inarguable sentiments, and they underscore that Bentley is working firmly under the spell of Terrence Malick, American cinema’s great extoller of the spiritual and material interconnectedness of all living things. The Malickian inflections are especially pronounced when we see Grainier at home with his family, holding his baby girl beside a river, or watching her interact with a flock of chickens. When a much older Grainier rides the Great Northern Railway to Spokane, Washington, he looks confounded by his encounter with paved streets and tall buildings—a sequence that reminded me of the views of downtown Houston in Malick’s “The Tree of Life” (2011), which convey a similar sense of alienation from urban civilization.

The glory of Malick’s cinema lies in its poetic expansiveness, its vast and seemingly boundless associative power. It’s no huge knock on “Train Dreams” to say that it feels like a compacted, simplified version of the real deal, or that it feels sturdily prosaic by comparison. The problem lies in the specific quality of the prose, which, for all its meticulous restraint, is also at unnecessary pains to spell out every last meaning. That’s especially true in a closing montage that juxtaposes moments from Grainier’s life with shots of him soaring over the landscape in a biplane, in a rare experience of a modern world that has long since passed him by. It’s a predigested catharsis, less revelatory than summative in its effect, and it suggests—much as the prison drama “Sing Sing” suggested, with its dramatically expedient view of life and art behind bars—that Bentley and Kwedar have, fundamentally, a carpenter’s approach to cinema. They offer the promise and pleasure of handcrafted art, but with every rough edge sanded down, every surface given a soulful coat of varnish. “Beautiful, ain’t it? Just beautiful,” Grainier murmurs toward the heavens. Yes, but only just. ♦

Ah, 2025—yet another heck of a year! In the audio realm, as elsewhere, inventiveness is essential during challenging times—so when video-chat podcasts predominate, celebrity-hosted podcasts won’t stop proliferating, and our old friend public radio is under attack, high-quality audio shows, against all odds, persist. Jonathan Goldstein’s wonderful “Heavyweight,” done wrong by Spotify in late 2023, came back swinging, at Pushkin; Lauren Chooljian, of NHPR, returned with a justice-is-served follow-up episode to her excellent 2023 investigative series, “The 13th Step”; “This American Life” remained the industry standard, and has found success with a new subscription program; “Fresh Air” turned fifty and is going strong. And the ending, late this year, of two of the genre’s all-time best series—“WTF with Marc Maron” and the Melvyn Bragg era of “In Our Time”—provided a moment to reflect on the medium’s distinct power to educate, interrogate, and entertain, sometimes all at once. My picks for the year’s ten most impressive shows are below.

10. “The Audio Flux Podcast” and “Signal Hill”

In an era of post-podcast-boom funding cuts, two independent projects have bravely voyaged toward the cutting edge of audio, fostering both community and surprising results. Audio Flux, an organization founded two years ago by the veteran producers Julie Shapiro and John DeLore, provides regular prompts for short-form, often experimental audio, and presents the best “fluxworks” online and at conferences and festivals. This fall, it débuted “The Audio Flux Podcast,” a “zine for your ears” hosted by Amy Pearl, to showcase the highlights, including Yowei Shaw’s “To Cry or Not to Cry,” inspired by her layoff meeting at NPR. “Signal Hill,” an audio magazine founded by Liza Yeager and Jackson Roach, has released two issues this year (accompanied by reportedly good parties) and combines long-form and shorter work, often beautifully produced and sometimes truly special; my favorite pieces included a dispatch from a sheep farm next to a military camp in France and a portrait of a friendship between an American entomologist and a brilliant ten-year-old fan in Japan.

9. “Sea of Lies”

The expertly produced “Sea of Lies,” from the CBC’s investigative podcast “Uncover,” begins off the coast of Brixham, Devon, in 1996, with a British father-and-son duo who make a grisly discovery in the net of their trawler: the body of a man, wearing a Rolex. From there, the series’ host, Sam Mullins, unspools a head-spinning story of keen detective work, puzzling clues, false identities, embezzlement schemes, naïveté, and murder, in a tone that seems to be trying to resist jumping up and down with narrative pride. But that pride is justified, and the story makes for a vivid reminder about the creative treachery of some kinds of crime, and the importance of guarding against it.

8. “Heavyweight”

Jonathan Goldstein’s wondrous podcast, a work of gentle intimacy and subtle hilarity, has managed to maintain a high standard of greatness despite its own challenging conceit. In each episode, Goldstein or one of his fellow-producers explores a particular problem connected to someone’s past—an actor baffled by the blundering director of his first movie; a woman traumatized by a bizarre homecoming-queen mixup in high school—and tries to help resolve it. Often, this involves finding someone hard to track down and encouraging them to have a raw, honest conversation, which then becomes part of a satisfying narrative, for the benefit of both the subjects and the listeners. Sometimes the process takes years; miraculously, Goldstein keeps making it happen. His singular narration, tactful but dryly funny, is one of the show’s strongest attributes.

7. “Articles of Interest: Gear”

Avery Trufelman’s lively cultural history of clothing, having explored realms including the preppy, the punk, and the luxe, recently returned with a new season, “Gear,” about military garb (hunting clothes, performance gear, khaki, and far beyond) and its intricate connections with civilian life. Trufelman shoots clay pigeons and learns surprising stuff about camouflage; delves into the co-opting of military gear by sixties and seventies counterculture; and examines “gorpcore,” “the yuppification of the field jacket,” and the fact that military uniforms, owing to national-security concerns, must be made in U.S. factories, thus supporting the American clothing industry. As with all of her best work, including episodes of the design podcast “99% Invisible,” Trufelman finds seemingly hidden meaning in ubiquitous everyday items. She’s also a great narrative presence—casual but wise, curious but authoritative, friendly but respectful of our intelligence—with a velvety, fun-to-hear voice. Extra zing is hardly required, but drill-sergeant-style introductions to each chapter (“This is not your mama’s house! . . . You are now the property of the United States Army! Chapter . . . TWO!”) provide it.

6. “The History Podcast”

“The History Podcast,” from the BBC, is essentially a series of miniseries, hosted by a variety of people. This year, it yielded at least three exemplary works. I was unexpectedly delighted by “Invisible Hands,” in which the shrewd and engaging broadcaster David Dimbleby, now eighty-seven, takes us through the history of free-market capitalism, a narrative that includes a Sussex chicken farmer, a wartime parachuting tragedy, and a vomiting conservative M.P.; in a year when economic philosophies have dominated headlines, it makes for an especially gratifying listen. “The House at No. 48” is a twisty tale of family secrets; it begins with a mysterious suitcase and morphs into a contemplation of whether past betrayals can ever be healed. “Half-Life,” another family chronicle, had me hooked from its first line: “My grandmother grew up brushing her teeth with radioactive toothpaste.”

5. “Camp Swamp Road”

The Wall Street Journal reporter Valerie Bauerlein covers national affairs from Raleigh, North Carolina, and here she presents, with an appealing hint of a Southern accent, a stunning story about the fatal road-rage shooting of a man named Scott Spivey, on a country road near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in 2023. This is far from a whodunnit; the shooter admits to the killing and was on the phone with a 911 dispatcher when he did it, and there are witnesses. The question is whether the shooting was justifiable self-defense under the state’s Stand Your Ground law. The answer appears to be straightforward, but, thanks to a trove of damning audio that details police corruption, the killer’s intent, and more, it turns out to be anything but. The often baffling nature of Stand Your Ground laws, and of citizens’ freewheeling interpretations of them, is the context in which the whole thing swims, and Bauerlein does an exemplary job of presenting the characters, including the shooter and Spivey’s justice-seeking sister, and their circumstances. Both the podcast and the legal case draw on many hours of secretly recorded phone calls, which are all the more incredible for having been recorded by the shooter.

4. “A Tiny Plot”

“Snap Judgment,” from KQED, in San Francisco, has made plenty of great work over the years, and this five-episode series, from the producer Shaina Shealy, is a standout. Shealy brings us into Union Point Park, where a community of highly organized homeless people in Oakland, California, are fighting for something “extraordinary”: the right to live together, by their own rules, in a city-sanctioned outdoor encampment. We get to know several of the group’s leaders, like President Matt, a former d.j. who now lives in a “Styrofoam mansion,” and Mama D, who plants mint to deter rats, along with city officials including Daryel Dunston, who climbs a pile of junk to negotiate about a “co-governance” model. Shealy is a deft, thoughtful interviewer, and the story makes for intriguing audio, evoking the inner lives of its subjects with empathy and respect.

3. “Spotlight: Snitch City”

This year, the Boston Globe’s investigative Spotlight team headed to the docks of New Bedford, Massachusetts, to bring us “Snitch City,” a gripping exposé of police corruption. Narrated by the reporter Dugan Arnett, the series begins on a summer night in 2018, with audio of a 911 call from a fisherman on a scalloping boat called the Little Tootie, where a frenzied man with bloodshot eyes and a pistol has come aboard, looking for drugs. “He says he’s a cop, but he doesn’t have no warrants,” the caller says. The cop claims to be acting on a tip from a confidential informant, and is instantly let off the hook. This is just the tip of a bad-behavior iceberg. Arnett presents stories of New Bedford cops lying, bullying, stealing, inflating crime-solving statistics—and of informants who feel trapped and fear retribution. The Spotlight team, best known for its reporting on the Catholic Church’s sexual-abuse coverups, shows the harm that secrecy fosters in yet another organization without oversight. Audio of dockside atmospherics, along with incisive, sometimes darkly funny interviews with former informants, dealers, and cops, makes for an especially vivid listen.

2. “Final Thoughts: Jerry Springer”

As in his 2023 series “Think Twice,” about Michael Jackson, the reliably excellent producer and host Leon Neyfakh creates a work that resonates far beyond one flawed man’s biography. The late Jerry Springer, who created the circuslike “Jerry Springer Show” and hosted it from 1991 to 2018, started his career as a talented political thinker and news analyst, and went on to serve as the mayor of Cincinnati, an anchorman, and the host of a progressive-politics chat program on Air America. But he is best known, rightly, as the purveyor of a genre of cheap and exploitative talk television, complete with fistfights and flying folding chairs, that helped give rise to even more corrosive media today. With his usual knack for good storytelling and brilliantly constructed audio clips, Neyfakh traces the history of this genre alongside the history of Springer’s own professional choices. We come away wondering what might have been, had Springer better deployed his gifts.

1.“Fela Kuti: Fear No Man”

This fall, Jad Abumrad, the creator of “Radiolab,” “More Perfect,” and “Dolly Parton’s America,” released a mighty biographical podcast about Fela Kuti, the legendary Nigerian musician and Afrobeat pioneer. The show took three years to make. Abumrad and his team travelled to London, Paris, L.A., and Lagos, interviewing Fela Kuti’s loved ones; talking to musicians and admirers, from Obama to Flea; and digging up context about Nigerian art, politics, and social history. The result is bursting with life, humor, pain, interesting ideas, and, of course, sharp, catchy, hypnotic music. Abumrad, who loves a far-out groove, has a ball re-creating the textures of Kuti’s sonic and quasi-meditative greatness; a recurring metaphor about cycles builds throughout the series, just like one of its subject’s long, looping riffs. Kuti was also a vital dissenter during an oppressive Nigerian regime, and was often the target of government retribution; I can’t think of another show that’s both danceable and, by its end, profoundly heartbreaking. ♦

So you’re nine and a half months pregnant, and you’re starting to wonder: When do I get this baby out of me? It’s a great question, but one that defies easy answers. To make things a bit simpler, here are some guidelines for when to seek medical attention for your upcoming delivery.

Don’t go to the hospital when you start having painless contractions. These can begin weeks before the baby is due to arrive, and you’ll probably get sent right back home. It’s also not time to go to the hospital when you begin spotting. If you’re a woman, you’ve been spotting regularly since you were about twelve, so this tells you nothing.

Just because you’re dilated doesn’t mean there’s any reason to head to the hospital. For one thing, you have no idea whether or not you’re dilated unless you’re already at the hospital, so in that sense it’s a non-starter. Also, it all depends on where you’re dilated. If it’s your eyes, for example, that’s unrelated to birthing.

If your contractions are more than ten minutes apart, it’s not time to go to the hospital yet. Instead, just sit on your bouncy ball and wait another few months until your baby is ready to stop bouncing.

Losing your mucus plug is a sign that labor might be starting, but there’s no reason to run out the door. Instead, try to distract yourself for a while. If you want ideas for how to do that, maybe Google the genius who thought that “mucus plug” was a charming term for something that emerges from a pregnant body.

Nausea can be a sign that labor is approaching, but it’s also a sign of so many other things—reading the news, for example. Stay put.

So, you’re on the toilet, and everything is red. You might assume that you’ve had your “bloody show.” This doesn’t mean you need to leap into action—at least, not until you’ve confirmed that it’s not just fruit punch. No reason to rush to the labor and delivery ward. Take a few deep breaths and try to focus on other things, like why you might be bleeding fruit punch.

Some people say that it’s time to go to the hospital when your butthole gets engaged. I disagree—we all deserve happiness, even buttholes. Congrats to the happy couple.

Perhaps your contractions are now five to seven minutes apart. Yes, technically this is a clue that it’s time to go to the hospital, but it’s entirely possible that you miscounted. You’re in labor; you’re not thinking clearly. Just stay put and keep counting until the baby comes.

If you think it’s time to go, it’s time to stay—said the musical artist George Michael.

Whoosh! Your water just broke. That doesn’t mean that the hospital is your next move. Obviously not! You need to clean your floor first. Or do you want your baby to come home to a Slip ’N Slide?

O.K., your baby is crowning a little bit, but, occasionally, the baby goes in and out a few times. It all depends on how many weeks of winter are left. Or something like that.

The baby has fully emerged from your uterus, and you’re still at home. At this point, you may be wondering: Shouldn’t I be at the hospital? Did I make a mistake and stay home too long? How do I get this baby a birth certificate? Or a Social Security number? These are all fair questions, but that doesn’t mean it’s time to go to the hospital. For one thing, your baby doesn’t need an S.S.N.—it’s not like it has any chance of ever receiving Social Security payments.

So, when should you go to the hospital for childbirth? Whenever you want the epidural.♦

Here’s a hypothetical: a man walks into a bar, buys a drink, and starts reading from a paperback copy of David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest.” He could very well be reading “Moby-Dick” or “Gravity’s Rainbow” or “Middlemarch,” but, for the sake of this setup, let’s say it’s Wallace’s 1996 novel, with its thousand-plus pages and hundreds of endnotes and the ghosts of a million bespectacled graduate students whispering, “You know it’s got a nonlinear plot, right?” To the severely online, this guy is not simply enjoying a good book in the company of strangers but participating in the practice of “performative reading,” a concept that’s recently gained a curious notoriety. A performative reader treats books like accessories, lugging around canonical texts as a ploy to attract a romantic partner or as a way to revel in the pleasure of feeling superior to others. While everyone else is scrolling social media and silencing life with noise-cancelling headphones, the performative reader insists upon his intelligence with attention-seeking insincerity, begging to be noticed with the aid of a big, look-at-me, capital-“B” book.

This way of perceiving social reality—and particularly a person’s reading life—may seem inane, even deranged. But performative reading has firmly implanted itself into the popular imagination, becoming a meme for a generation of people who, by all accounts, aren’t reading a whole lot of books. On TikTok and Instagram, users post short-form videos to satirize the affectations of the performative reader, who is usually male: a twentysomething guy in an oversized sweater vest, reading two hardcovers at once while descending an escalator; a scarf-donning dude at a café, reading a book upside down; a guy sitting at an outdoor patio, glancing up to see who’s watching him annotate a text. Similarly, on X, the ruse of performative reading has come to mask a more earnest quest: to share one’s actual passion for books while also seeming in on the joke. (It’s not uncommon for a user to post a picture of himself reading a heady book with a preëmptive “I’m a performative reader” caption.) These posts function, in part, as an ironic foil to the way that influencers and celebrities have come to wield physical books as material signals of taste, hiring “book stylists” to provide them with novels for vacation photographs and social-media posts, to curate their at-home libraries and name-branded book clubs. Performative reading has emerged as a suspicious activity not because reading books is suspect but because being beheld reading a book is understood to be yet another way for one to market himself, to portray to the world that he is indeed deeper and more expansive than his craven need for attention—demonstrated by reading a difficult book in public—suggests.

When did life become a landmine of possible performative gestures? There’s activism and performative activism, masculinity and performative masculinity, positivity and performative positivity—et cetera, ad nauseam. Are these neologisms diagnosing modern phenomena or illuminating preëxisting cultural realities? If all human activity can be measured on a spectrum of authenticity and performativity, what metrics can we use to weed out the genuine from the fabricated? Will we just know? And why do we care? If our culture of liberal individualism demands anything of us, it is to be, above all else, authentic. To be seen as a poseur or a phony—a person who affects rather than is—violates some nebulous code of acceptable self-cultivation. No one wants to be perceived as the person at the skate park with all the right gear but none of the right lingo, the fan at the concert who doesn’t know any of the lyrics, or, worse, the political protester who spends hours making a quippy sign but doesn’t know the name of their district representative. If our authenticity is questioned—if we are caught pretending and playacting—what ground do we have left to stand on? If we are deemed inauthentic, how can we stand for anything at all? Conversely, if everything is potentially performative, how will we ever work up the courage to step outside of our sphere of normal, to risk being earnest and cringe, and experience something transformative?

Performing personhood has perhaps never been as panoptical, and top of mind, as it is today. Social-media platforms prioritize the fastidious maintenance and monitoring of online personas, creating spaces where identity construction is central to the user experience. But how is one to authentically represent themselves online? Unlike offline reality, where spontaneous and unrehearsed human expression is not only possible but inevitable, a life online is always reminded of its own artifice. To post is to calculate, deliberate, manipulate—performance is built into the experience, whether the poster is aware of this dynamic or not. This explains why unflinchingly earnest content rarely flies on social media; does the poster not see that simply by posting, they are revealing themselves to be image-conscious and vain? A chief reason that “virtue signalling” became so hotly contested in the mid-twenty-tens was not just because it was in bad taste to express passive, entirely gestural solidarity with a political issue but because the broader mores of social-media use had begun to shift dramatically. It was no longer normative to post a photo of your breakfast, or to write an Instagram caption about how much you loved your mom on International Women’s Day. Suddenly, any type of unironic persona-forward material entered the hall of mirrors of performativity criticism. These days, users can avoid being labelled as performative by imbuing content with the metatextual awareness that they are, in some way, aware of the performance. But it is still impossible to fully ignore the spectre of performativity on social media, despite the apps’ assertion that they are organic breeding grounds for genuine human expression. (Instagram’s mission statement claims its purpose is to bring “you closer to the people and the things you love”; TikTok says that its platform allows users to “unleash their creativity and share authentic stories.”)

Conceptions of authenticity and sincerity have dominated Western thought since the Enlightenment, a period in which Immanuel Kant argued that individuals should be free to pursue knowledge as a means to better understand the human condition, and thus their authentic selves. (“The motto of Enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude!,” Kant wrote. “Have courage to use your own understanding.”) Kant’s belief that “a constant critique of the world around us and of ourselves,” per the scholar Anita Seppä, afforded individuals the ability to “reach a more mature stage of existence and individual autonomy.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau was more sensitive to the mystical nature of existence, contending that genuine selfhood emerged from within and was not entirely relational; the true self was a natural, fixed thing that could in turn be malleably expressed out into the world. Few philosophies speak as saliently to our current culture of self-absorption as this post-Enlightenment obsession with authenticity; the guiding promise of the American project is to free individual humans from undue constraint and control, allowing them to discover their true selves and do anything that they put their mind to, regardless of their religion, race, gender, or class background. This promise, despite centuries of unequal fulfillment, still fuels the sputtering engine of American mythology.

Such an absolutist vision of individualism, however, undermines the systemic conditions that inform our relationship with the world, and ourselves. If we are to believe that the purpose of our lives is to unearth and express an authentic version of our true natures, we risk ignoring the myriad associations and forces that determine how we conceive of these premises in the first place. The philosopher Michel Foucault questioned this abiding belief that self-expression leads to liberation, advocating instead for an end to “all these forms of individuality, of subjectivity, of consciousness, of the ego, on which we have built and from which we have tried to build and to constitute knowledge.” Foucault argued that such idealism distracts the individual from grappling with, and critiquing, the power structures that lay claim to their actual freedoms—health care, reproductive rights, education, gender identity, and economic equality among them—which remain under the direction of a “biopower,” a term Foucault used to denote state and social institutions that organize and control a population.

In this view, the performative-reading phenomenon appears less like a newfangled way of calling people pretentious and more like an odious reflection of society’s increasing deprioritization of the written word. Reading a book is antithetical to scrolling; online platforms cannot replicate the slow, patient, and complex experience of reading a weighty novel. This is especially revealing because social media can replicate other art-consuming experiences for users: one could exclusively listen to music, look at visual art, or watch film clips via TikTok or Instagram and reasonably (if not depressingly) claim to have a relationship with these mediums—authentic relationships, fostered with the help of an app. The only way that an internet mind can understand a person reading a certain kind of book in public is through the prism of how it would appear on a feed: as a grotesquely performative posture, a false and self-flattering manipulation, or a desperate attempt to attract a romantic partner.

It’s hard to ignore that the performative-reading discourse is occurring just as literacy rates in America decline. The reports are grim: Americans read for pleasure forty per cent less than they did twenty years ago, and forty per cent of fourth graders lack basic reading comprehension. Humanities professors at élite colleges bemoan their students’ inability to not only read complete texts but also to analyze shorter excerpts. The rise in artificial intelligence compounds the problem, with programs like ChatGPT threatening to nullify the need to learn how to manually research and synthesize information, and then to process and analyze that information through writing. Universities are brokering deals with companies like OpenAI to introduce chatbots into their students’ curricula and, all the while, slashing their humanities departments. The foundational values of the humanities—critical thinking, philosophical inquiry, media literacy, moral development, creative and complex problem solving—will surely suffer, if not vanish, in this new era of the corporate university. And if higher education has given up on reading, how could we possibly blame the individual for doing the same?

The irony of “Infinite Jest” becoming prime performative-reading material is that it is a novel perfectly suited to address our current cultural conundrums. Wallace depicts a politically volatile corporate dystopia on the brink of environmental collapse, an existential reality its characters seldom seem to recognize. To escape from the horrors of the external world—and the indistinguishable ways in which the external world influences one’s inner life—characters turn to drugs and alcohol, intensive sports training, and excessive media consumption, the latter of which is dramatized by a digitized entertainment cartridge so powerful that it vegetates anyone who views it. “Infinite Jest” is a novel obsessed with the shared solitude of contemporary life, of the loneliness and lack of meaning endemic to consumerism and market capitalism. Wallace argues, as he does throughout his œuvre, that salvation arrives through careful attention, through sacrificing one’s myopic sense of self to something larger, holier, more expansive. In Wallace’s personal life, this sacrifice came, in part, by reading books, a practice he feared was losing its moral imperative in an age of constant, inescapable stimulation. “Reading requires sitting alone, by yourself, in a quiet room,” he said in a 2003 interview. “I have friends, intelligent friends, who don’t like to read because they get—it’s not just bored. There’s an almost dread that comes up.” If our screens are adept at anything, it’s allaying this dread, convincing us to scroll until the loneliness goes away. Perhaps the performative reader is doing just that—performing, wielding a book for a perpetual, undying audience. Or maybe they’re leaning into the dread that Wallace spoke of, hoping to discover who they really are once the curtains close. ♦